My 412+ is setup as a simple JBOD so all 4 drives are grouped as one volume. One of the 4 drives is having issues, so the NAS is beeping at me with a volume failure message. Three other drives are healthy according to the NAS. All files are backed up on other drives so no worries there. If I replace drive 4 will I have access to the volume again (minus any files that were on drive 4) or will I have to setup a new volume and upload all the files again?
Hi @radioclash,
Unfortunately, based on how you described your setup, you will not be able to replace a single drive without losing the volume. Typical JBOD configuration spreads a file’s data across all the drives in the volume without any additional information added on how to reconstruct that data should one drive fail. As a result, a single drive failure, or removing one drive from the volume will break the whole volume in an irrecoverable manner.
Make sure you have a good backup of all the data and rebuild from scratch.
When you rebuild, Synology has an interesting technology called Synology Hybrid Raid that allows you to build a recoverable RAID array using dissimilar drives. This can be used if all the drives are the same or different. I recommend when you rebuild your volume that you investigate building it as an SHR.
Good luck!
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Thank you, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be that easy 
Thank you for the help!
RAID 5 or whatever proprietary RAID 5 equivelent your equipment has is the way anyone should set up a NAS… (and as a backup store for family PCs) …only downside is writes can be slower but this is not an issue for serving files like from a music archive. Oh, and you need more disk space for the same amount as the disks now have to store redundant data across them.
I use a Netgear NAS and have no complaints… When you hot swap a failing drive… I was getting alerts on one of the disks… the issue for the Netgear was it took days and days for the RAID to be re-built. You can simply pull the bad drive, insert the new, all without powering down or doing anything else… thus “hot swap”. The unit then starts the rebuilding process… and this took forever for about 4.5 terabytes of data… I have four drives in my NAS.
Overall, I am happy with my NAS… and I recommend this for those with big libraries… but they do have their downsides but not much.
Peace
Bruce in Philly
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